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Traditional approaches to project management emphasize long-term planning and a focus on stability to manage risk. But today, managers leading complex projects often combine traditional and “agile” methods to give them more flexibility — and better results.

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An analysis of three Mars missions undertaken by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory concluded that a key success for the Mars Pathfinder project (shown here) was a high level of collaboration.

Image courtesy of NASA.

In today’s dynamic and competitive world, a project manager’s key challenge is coping with frequent unexpected events. Despite meticulous planning and risk-management processes, a project manager may encounter, on a near-daily basis, such events as the failure of workers to show up at a site, the bankruptcy of a key vendor, a contradiction in the guidelines provided by two engineering consultants or changes in customers’ requirements.1 Such events can be classified according to their level of predictability as follows: events that were anticipated but whose impacts were much stronger than expected; events that could not have been predicted; and events that could have been predicted but were not. All three types of events can become problems that need to be addressed by the project manager. The objective of this article is to describe how successful project managers cope with this challenge.2

Coping with frequent unexpected events requires an organizational culture that allows the project manager to exercise a great amount of flexibility. Here are two examples of advanced organizations that took steps to modify their cultures accordingly.

A group of 23 project managers who had come from all over NASA to participate in an advanced project management course declared mutiny. They left the class in the middle of the course, claiming that the course text, based on NASA’s standard procedures, was too restrictive for their projects and that they needed more flexibility. With the blessing of NASA’s top leadership, the class members then spent four months conducting interviews at companies outside of NASA. This led to a rewriting of numerous NASA procedures. Among other things, NASA headquarters accepted the group’s recommendation to give NASA project managers the freedom to tailor NASA’s standard procedures to the unique needs of their projects. A similar movement to enhance project managers’ flexibility occurred at Procter & Gamble, where the number of procedures for capital projects was reduced from 18 technical standards and 32 standard operating procedures to four technical standards and four standard operating procedures.

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About the Authors

Alexander Laufer is the director of the Consortium for Project Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Edward J. Hoffman is NASA’s chief knowledge officer. Jeffrey S. Russell is vice provost for lifelong learning, dean of the Continuing Studies Division and executive director of the Consortium for Project Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. W. Scott Cameron is the global project management technology process owner at Procter & Gamble.

8. For the idea that building trust requires deliberate and careful choice, see R.C. Solomon and F. Flores, “Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life” (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2001), 13-15, 153-4; the NASA and U.S. Air Force examples presented in this article are based on case studies discussed in A. Laufer, “Mastering the Leadership Role in Project Management: Practices That Deliver Remarkable Results” (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: FT Press, 2012). Building trust was a key to the success of all eight case studies documented in this book.

16. Organizational researcher Karl E. Weick stresses that the ability to notice disruptions early on is not detached from the ability to cope with these disruptions. As he puts it: “When you develop the capacity to act on something, then you can afford to see it.” K.E. Weick, “Drop Your Tools: On Reconfiguring Management Education,” Journal of Management Education 31, no.1 (February 2007): 5-16.

20. In a study of project managers on construction sites, it was found that moving about at the on-site production areas occupied 28 percent of their time. See A. Laufer, A. Shapira and D. Telem, “Communicating in Dynamic Conditions: How Do On-Site Construction Project Managers Do It?” Journal of Management in Engineering 24, no. 2 (April 2008): 75-86.

ii. M.S. Feldman and W.J. Orlikowski, “Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory,” Organization Science 22, no. 5 (September-October 2011): 1240-1253; and S. Tengblad, ed., “The Work of Managers,” 337-354. Our research approach was influenced in many respects by management scholar Henry Mintzberg’s approach. That includes viewing management as a practice (not as a profession) and stressing the use of systematic observations of managers. In particular, it involves the use of “rich description,” about which Mintzberg writes: “I need to be stimulated by rich description. … Tangible data is best … and stories are best of all. …Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.” See H. Mintzberg, “Developing Theory About the Development of Theory,” in “Great Minds in Management: The Process of Theory Development,” eds. K.G. Smith and M.A. Hitt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 355-372.

1 Comment On: What Successful Project Managers Do

Kolawole Awotundun-Francis | August 3, 2015

I absolutely concur with the article as it further heightens my appreciation for adoption of dual tactics from Strategy and Execution because it has become imperative for todays managers to be flexible in combating emergent challenges that somewhat may not have been foreseen or diagnosed. It is therefore right to lean more on the emergent startegies along with basic planning technicality if success is to be achieved in meeting stakeholders expectation even when they are outside market forces.
Thanks MITSloan for the insight.
Kola Awotundun-Francis